1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for administering a plurality of virtual machines (‘VMs’) in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Distributed computing environments today often share and pool resources of many computers so that efficient utilization of resources may be effected in order to execute various workloads. In such distributed computing environments many virtual machines are often instantiated to execute workloads. Such VMs, however, from time to time require management—relocation to other hardware hosts, duplication on other hardware hosts, failover, checkpointing, and so on. Techniques to effect such management operations at the present, however, lack efficiency and are often time consuming and tedious for a user to carry out. As the number and size of VMs in distributed computing environments increases with the size of the distributed computing environment itself, the inefficiencies of such management techniques also increase.